Over the years, there have been numerous Chinese input methods. Some of these Chinese input methods require a user to know the pronunciation of the character to be input with certain degree of accuracy. The user is then required to press the keys corresponding to the pronunciation and choose from a list of character candidates. However, due to the fact that there are a variety of dialects used by people speaking Chinese besides the standard mandarin and the standard Cantonese, an inaccurate pronunciation often leads to a long list of character candidates and reduced efficiency of inputting Chinese characters, not to mention there are a large number of characters having the same pronunciation. In some cases, the user may not know the pronunciation of a character at all, which makes it impossible for her/him to input this character with above methods.
Some other Chinese input methods require the user to memorize a detailed mapping between elements of Chinese characters and a full set of alphabet keys and to decompose a character with the mapped alphabet keys in order to input the character. More often than not, such an input method requires the user to spend a lot of time memorizing the aforementioned detailed mapping and practicing using it before the user can use the input method to input Chinese characters proficiently.